Isabelo's Archive

The Haze

of History

Victoria of the Magellan fleet

In 1521, after the death of Ferdinand Magellan, the remnants of the Spanish expedition meandered through the islands. Reaching a harbor in Mindanao called Kipit, they were welcomed by the local king, Raia Calanao.¹

Alone, the Italian Antonio Pigafetta went to explore the land in the company of the king. Traveling two leagues upriver, they reached the king’s house two hours after nightfall. Here, in the light of torches, they dined and spent the night. The following day, the Italian walked about the land and, after dinner, asked the king by means of signs whether he could see the queen. The king assented and together they went to the summit of a lofty hill where the queen’s house was located.

When I entered the house, Pigafetta later wrote, I made a bow to the queen, and she did the same to me, whereupon I sat down beside her. She was making a sleeping mat of palm leaves. There were porcelain jars and gongs of bronze inside the house and many male and female slaves who were there to serve the queen. Pigafetta later took his leave and returned to the king’s house. That afternoon, he returned to the harbor, and the Spanish ships weighed anchor and sailed west southwest.

The land soon dissolved in the haze.

Maidens

Shrouded in

Darkness

A seventeenth-century binukot

AN intriguing image in Philippine epic narratives is that of the maiden shrouded in darkness.

In a major strand in the action of the Manobo Tuwaang epic cycle, the hero Tuwaang goes on a journey to seek and woo a maiden shrouded in darkness (mangovay nid kakuambu’ rut dallom).¹ Little in the narrative specifies the concrete situation, reduced as it is to the formulaic evocation of paradigmatic acts — the maiden emerging from a dark interior, quiet (she would not speak), gentle and sedate (the gait of the walking dove, the pace of the treading pigeon), and luminous. She was the resplendent ray, the eye of the rising sun, coming up the horizon.

In the Ilianon epic chants of Bukidnon-Cotabato, the maiden is a young woman kept in a room of gold that has to be unlocked for her to appear before a suitor for a ritual offering of betel chew.² In the the Arumanen Manobo narratives of northern Cotabato, the figure is that of the pinintu, a young woman kept in a safe or secret room, a sealed chamber or partitioned room.³ In the Subanon epic Sandayo of the Zamboanga peninsula, claustration is indicated in the recurrent image of the heroine leaving or entering her bukotan (cloister). It is also suggested by an episode in which, during a dowry negotiation, the maiden’s mother asks the suitor for a golden basin to be put inside the maiden’s room and a golden bridge thin as hair that would connect their house to the suitor’s so that the maiden may never tread / ground nor grass.⁴ Other Subanon narratives tell of binukot princesses who are kept inside a room and are not exposed to the wind or allowed to have their feet touch the ground.

The figure of the cloistered maiden is most developed in the Maranao Darangen in the person of the liyamin (princess), dwelling in her beautifully furnished laminan (tower). She is of noble bearing and a beauty described as luminescent: brightly seen as far as the sea, brighter than the fifth night of the full moon high above the mountains.⁵

Anthropologist E. Arsenio Manuel, who recorded the Tuwaang epic, explains the luminescence of the cloistered maiden thus: beautiful things shed off light in darkness.

IT does seem that female claustration was widely distributed as an idea in the Southern Philippines. It is surprising that the anthropological literature is mostly silent on the subject.

The works of Emerson Christie, Laura Watson Benedict, and Fay-Cooper Cole, the earliest anthropological investigations of the homeland of the Mindanao epics, do not mention the practice of enclosing women, whether directly or in relation to matters like dwelling types or ritual events. Christie writes: Among the Subanuns there is no such institution as the girls’ house or the bachelors’ house of the Bontok Igorots. While there are passing references to the isolation of child-delivering and menstruating women, these ethnographies also cite practices that appear to contradict the presence of an institution like claustration. Cole notes that chastity is not greatly valued while Benedict observes that there are few restrictions on male-female interaction. The Bagobo woman, Benedict says, is a free agent; she accepts or rejects her suitor at will; her parents will not force her to marry unless she wishes.⁶

While the silence of the sources is remarkable one cannot argue from it that the practice did not exist. The exigencies that attend cultural descriptions — time, location, fieldwork conditions, theory and method — are such that an area of doubt remains.

Elsewhere, in fact, references to early dwelling types suggest the marking off of spaces for women. The Manobo house includes the sinavong, a room for unmarried girls into which young men are not allowed to intrude. While the common Manobo dwelling is a small, one-room hut, there are larger dwellings (usually belonging to the chiefs) with three internal features: an elevated platform at one end of the house, the suspended sleeping beds for men under the roof, and small side rooms for girls. The T’boli house features a t’bnalay, an attic-like sleeping area for the young unmarried women in the household or the family head’s first or favorite wife. The traditional Tausug house also has a room called angkap, built close to the roofing of the house, for girls who are secluded when they turn eleven or twelve so that they will have no contact with the opposite sex outside of their immediate kin within the household. The angkap serves as sleeping quarters and space where the girls attend to their grooming and do weaving and embroidery. It is connected to the main dwelling area by a movable bamboo ladder that can be hauled up or lowered down.⁷

In the more hierarchically articulated Maranao society, the woman’s domain is more formally and elaborately marked. It is represented by the lamin or laminan, which is constructed atop the torogan (royal house), as dwelling or refuge for the unmarried princess and her ladies. Accessible only through an entrance located near the sultan’s bed, it is decorated with multicolored, embroidered draperies, and okir designs — and sometimes love verses (pananaroon) — carved on wooden walls. Inside the lamin are chests, heirlooms, and a centerpiece bed, decorated with a canopy (kolambo) embroidered with beads and sequins.⁸

Local languages also offer evidence for claustration. Words like the Maranao lamin (laminan), Subanon bukotan and pintawan, Talaandig paiyak, and Manobo pintu’ and putali’ construe the act of secluding a person, almost always a woman. In Cebuano, Hiligaynon, and Subanon, the word bukot means covered, wrapped (as by a blanket or shawl), kept in a room or compartment, or, simply (in Subanon and archaic Cebuano), room. Its meaning is echoed in northern Philippine languages, in the Ibanag bukkut (enveloped) and the Tagalog bukod (to put apart or separate from others).⁹

Perhaps the earliest reference to containment is to be found in the 1617 Bisayan dictionary of Jesuit Mateo Sanchez, Vocabulario de la Lengua Bisaya.¹⁰ Under bocot (private room, interior), binocot is defined as the most high-ranking woman, who is always cloistered and has to be carried whenever she sallies forth. For bocot, there is the cryptic note on how the word also means blood, wound. (It may be noted that dugo, blood, also refers to menstruation in Bisayan.) Binocot also appears in an entry for oiod-oiod: "To walk very slowly like a binocot, or like the chiefs (datos) when they go on parade… to walk pompously, with pride and vanity."

A related word is laming, which refers, in Cebuano and Hiligaynon, to confinement, although it is most commonly used today to mean the practice of isolating an animal for fattening or controlling its food prior to slaughtering. The word may not be unrelated to the Maranao lamin or laminan (an inaccessible tower in the palace where the princess is kept for seclusion, and its derivative liyamin, princess) as well as the name for women deities in the Palawan epic, Linamin. Augustinian Alonso de Mentrida’s seventeenth-century Hiligaynon Diccionario does not only define bocot as a room or retreat but collapses into a single definition the practice of confining animals and girls: "to keep the girls or the pigs in the house (en casa), without their going downstairs, or keeping them in a retreat, such as the Spaniards have."¹¹

Lexical items and literary images do not necessarily prove actual practice. In defining the Manobo pintu’ (of a king, to place his daughter in seclusion so that she cannot be seen or molested by other people), anthropologist Richard Elkins says: This is known only in folklore.¹²

This is contradicted, however, by historical and ethnographic accounts. The Englishman William Dampier, who was in Mindanao in 1686–1687, alludes to the practice when he writes of the sultan’s daughter, that it is reported that the young princess is kept in a room, and never stirs out, and that she did never see any man but her father and Raja Laut her uncle, being then about fourteen years old.¹³ The Jesuit Francisco Alcina, who was in eastern Visayas in the seventeenth century, is more explicit. He says that the binukot are "high-status women who differ greatly in color because they remain at home (that is what the word binocot means), rarely going out and sometimes not even setting their feet upon the ground (for whenever there was a need for them to go out, they were carried by the men on their shoulders). And thus they have preserved their white features."¹⁴

E. Arsenio Manuel says that maidens shrouded in darkness are formulaic descriptions of a class of women called putali’ in Manobo, a favored and privileged daughter who is cloistered in a room of her own and is given only light household chores to do. Writing in 1956, Manuel noted that this practice was already a thing of the past.¹⁵ The same comment is made of the Subanon by Betram Tiemeyer and Felice Brichoux. Among the Subanon, especially in former times, a cherished daughter called binukot or pinidaya’ (sheltered) was treated like a princess and was not exposed to people, work, sun, or wind."¹⁶

IT is surprising that the binukot complex has not been systematically studied.¹⁷ References to the practice in the literature are fragmentary, fugitive, and contradictory. The reasons for containment are not fully explained and the form it takes is not clear beyond references to the binukot being covered by a net (Manobo kuambu) or kept in a room, cave, or tower. (Thus, if the present essay is more detailed than needed, blame it on the impulse to clear the ground for a better understanding of an enigmatic subject.)

Protecting chastity seems an obvious explanation for claustration. It is reported for different parts of the Malay world, albeit practiced with varying rigor and form. R.J. Wilkinson writes that Malay girls are usually kept shut up in their own homes from the age of ten to the time of their marriage… The confinement of girls served to guard them from the dangerous notice of the chiefs and also from the risk of their injuring their matrimonial prospects by any foolish compromising acts.¹⁸

Although the seventeenth-century Jesuit Francisco Combes does not mention women’s claustration, he reports that Subanon women esteem virginity, and keep it inviolate, even to advanced age, for the vocation of matrimony. This has secured them so much esteem and confidence in this region that the chiefs of high standing among the Lutaos, in order to guard their daughters more safely, have them reared among Subanos, so that they are not exposed to dangers in their own nation.¹⁹

Similarly, Manuel writes of the Manobo: In the olden days it was not an easy matter for a young man to see the face of a maiden as she was supposed to stay in the house and in her room… They were reared in the genteel ways and behaved in a polite and graceful manner. Premarital chastity was highly valued and marriage was a major concern, particularly the raising of bridewealth and the exchange of material goods in the process of marriage negotiations.²⁰ Elsewhere, however, Manuel is either silent or ambivalent on the confining of women. He stresses Manobo values of sociality, saying no individuals or persons were found living in isolation and alone for any considerable part of the year except priests, shamans, or individuals who leave the community for short periods of time because they were summoned by deities or spirits. He makes no reference to women’s claustration though he refers to a curious practice called lokkob (literally, door-cover), in which the parents of a girl hold a desirable man a virtual prisoner in their house until a marriage to their daughter is arranged or he is redeemed by his parents. Manuel says that this is also done with a suitable woman but very rarely.²¹

In his ethnography of central Panay, F. Landa Jocano is more explicit about the practice. Writing of the binukot, he says that if a daughter is personable and good-looking, her parents keep her inside the house, away from the harsh sun and exempt from hard work, so that she would gain for the family social prestige and more bridal gifts. The mother sees to it that no one, other than members of the family, sees her daughter and that the rumor about her beauty spreads throughout and beyond the community. The daughter is given instruction on childbirth, the care of her future husband, and domestic arts that reflect on the daintiness of her charm.²²

The mid-twentieth century, functionalist ethnographies of Manuel and Jocano locate claustration in the context of marriage and exchange systems. Yet it is clear that the practice has a meaning that exceeds that of enhancing bridewealth. Moreover, chastity in indigenous society is not a well-studied subject. Caught up in the polemic over early Spanish characterizations of native promiscuity, comments on the subject insufficiently specify local notions of chastity, which, to begin with, is not to be conflated with simple technical intactness or virginity.

SECLUSION is a form of marking difference by drawing boundaries in space between a within and without. As Mary Douglas writes, ideas about separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose a system on an inherently untidy experience. It is only by exaggerating the difference between within and without, above and below, male and female, with and against, that a semblance of order is created.²³

Various forms of segregating bodies, however, need to be specified and contextualized. There are differences in manner and degree in the sealing of the body, the permeability of barriers, or the contact between inside and outside. Claustration can range from the total or partial enclosure of the body (being separately housed, covered by a sheet or shawl, or enclosed in a net, such as the Manobo kuambu) to the enforcement of symbolic barriers to male-female interaction. The folklorist Virgilio Resma writes, the Subanon bukotan can mean a house, room, or secluded nook in the forest that can serve as haven or refuge.²⁴ The drawing of the Bisayan binukot in Alcina’s text suggests that concealment can take the form of a long, knee-length mantle that can cover or expose her body and face.

Claustration can last for varying periods of time or even a lifetime. In many societies, it can apply to both men and women, usually as part of life-cycle events like childbirth, circumcision, menstruation, and death; the initiation or apprenticeship of shamans; or simple escape from the pressures of exposure and lack of privacy.²⁵ It can be part of institutionalized customs that maintain a given social order, as in the isolation of holy men, or take the form of anti-social withdrawal from that order, as in the case of witches. One notes, for instance, that Francisco Combes speaks of a class of persons among the Subanon called Labia, celibate men who are highly esteemed and are kept closely concealed, whether it were for the sake of their ancient observances I do not know.²⁶

The marking off of bodies and spaces can assume richly polysemous forms. This is shown in the use of the veil and other kinds of body covering, most prominently illustrated in the Islamic hejaab, which can, according to place and culture, range from a partial veil (a scarf covering the head) to a full veil (a garment that covers the whole body, except the eyes). Often reductively viewed as a form of female oppression, such body covering is multivalent, signifying gender and generational status, socioeconomic position, family honor, and ethnic and religious identity. Most basic, it involves control of the personal bodily space of a woman, especially in relation to spatial relationships between men and women.²⁷

The ambivalence of the veil is illustrated in the controversy over veiled women (tapadas) in early modern Spain and Peru.²⁸ While the veil is associated with modesty in Catholic-devotional practice, women can manipulate it, concealing or revealing themselves for deception, seduction, or the freedom of anonymity. Where visibility and legibility are important for social control, the veil can be subversive in its uses. Veiled, women were able to conceal or reveal their faces at will, to pass for other than what they really were, to navigate public spaces as they pleased, and — perhaps most unsettling of all — to circumvent the authority of male relatives, church, and state. Thus, atapadas (the covered ones) in colonial Peru were characterized as sorceresses who shamelessly went about in public, walking the streets or flirting from balconies, masked by very carefully and seductively draped veils. Incognito, they enjoyed improper liberties and caused public scandal, thus scrambling social hierarchy and public order. The threat they posed was such that religious sermons and royal decrees in early-colonial Peru (and in Spain) prohibited women from wearing veils in public places, requiring that they reveal their faces so they can be recognized.

As these examples show, a single, reductive explanation flattens out a complex cultural practice. The play of visibility and invisibility is charged with ambivalent meanings. Invisibility is a sign of absence, it is also a source of power.

ENCLOSURE raises the question of what is enclosed and what is excluded and for what purpose. It is not always clear, in the act of enclosure, who is being protected from what. Simultaneously empowered and immobilized, given high status and occluded visibility, the cloistered woman is an ambivalent figure.

The prosaic reading in some of our Philippine examples is that of laming (that, in its grossest interpretation, equates a woman to a fattened pig), which isolates a woman from exposure to dirt, work, harsh sun, ill wind, and men’s eyes, so that she stays fair and delicate, hence virginal and desirable. The premium on the fair woman raises the as-yet uninvestigated question of the value placed on whiteness in local culture, as illustrated, for instance, in the Subanon tale of the beautiful and revered Penokis (white skin), a datu’s daughter believed to be the daughter of a spirit (diwata), who was raped and killed and from whose body sprang a large spring that flooded and drowned the enemies of the tribe.²⁹

The bukot provides as well the space that disciplines the binukot in body care and training in the womanly arts and graces (such as weaving, singing, and the performance of such rituals as the betel-nut ceremony). All these enhance her value in the economy of family prestige, bridewealth, and marriage alliances. The practice has a class dimension since it is associated with high-status families (reinforcing rather than creating status), who can invest in what the process requires, including the idleness of a family member. Mateo Sanchez and Francisco Alcina specifically state that the binukot is a high-status woman.

It can be said that power in claustration does not lie so much in the contained but accrues to the authority that contains. Yet, this simplifies and disenchants a more complex process. Philippine examples represent bukot as a site of power and privilege rather than a condition of oppression. The binukot is a person endowed with some or all of these attributes: beauty, charisma, magical skills, and such gifts as being the bearer of the community’s memory, the singer of its traditions. At the heart of claustration is the idea that separation, purification and concentration are generative of power.

This is shown in the widely diffused practice of isolating menstruating and child-bearing women. While there are scattered references to this taboo in the Philippines (among the Batak of Palawan and the Aeta of Zambales, for instance), a systematic study of the subject has not been done. Among sixteenth-century Tagalogs, in the menstrual rite called dating, the girl is "blindfolded, secluded, and attended by an old woman (katalunan, shaman) for four days. The Boxer Codex of 1590 says that she is kept in an enclosure of mantles," in dark space with the windows covered. At the end of the menstrual period, she is led to a stream for a ritual bath, without her feet touching the ground, by either being carried or guided across an elevated walkway (a practice suggested in the Subanon Sandayo episode cited earlier). Upon her return home, her body is rubbed with oil and civet or musk, followed by two days and nights of exclusively female company and singing. It is a liminal rite that marks the girl as now marriageable.³⁰

Emerson Christie reported that the early twentieth-century Subanon had a special little hut called ghosina to which the expectant mother was removed when childbirth was imminent. She is not only isolated in the ghosina, various charms are hung about and under the hut to keep off evil spirits. For a number of days after birth, the mother is placed lying down on a little platform placed close to a specially constructed hearth. Here she lies in the smoke and heat, exposed to the fire for several days to dry up the womb and ward off dangerous fluxes.³¹ This practice of roasting the mother is reported in other parts of Southeast Asia.

The meaning of this practice is well described by Janet Hoskins in eastern Indonesia where women in menstruation and childbirth are isolated in a hut at the edge of the village.³² No windows face the village; the doorway faces the forest; and women have to follow certain rules (bathing at a fountain forbidden to men, keeping away from places where men will likely be). Underlying these women’s segregation is the belief that menstrual blood can kill, make men blind, or attack their lungs so that they spit blood.

Arguing that the meanings of claustration are plural and variable according to location, Hoskins says that menstruation-as-pollution is too simple. Isolating women does not demonstrate a necessarily negative view of female bodies. Hoskins stresses women’s agency, citing that the cloistered women were proud that they controlled a dangerous menstrual flow associated with fertility, sickness, and death, and believed to be part of an occult realm of natural medicines that only women can control. Hence, they exercised the power of protecting their menfolk by secluding themselves, or keeping their menstruation secret as a weapon to undermine male authority through clandestine spells, medicines, and poisons. Moreover, the menstrual hut is not so much a prison as a house in which coresident women bond outside male control, and create solidarity as they engage in craftmaking, storytelling, and singing.

It can be argued that these are free spaces within what remains a male-dominated order. In his study of the Kwaio in the Solomon Islands, Roger Keesing argues against interpreting practices like women’s claustration in terms of a sharp and mutually antagonistic polarization of the sexes.³³ Among the Kwaio, men also undergo periods of seclusion in their own men’s hut. As women are confined to isolate the dangerous fluids of menstruation and childbirth, men are secluded to confine the dangerous manifestations of the sacrificial rites they perform. These are complementary practices in which, Keesing argues, the key categories deal not with women’s polluted substances as with boundaries, invasions, dissolutions of form. "It is not menstrual blood that emanates danger; it is menstrual blood in the wrong places. What men do in their isolation and what women do in theirs represent processes whereby form, cultural order — disrupted and dissolved — is re-created."

A similar argument is made by Valerio Valeri in the case of the Huaulu in the Moluccas, who practice confinement in a menstrual and childbirth hut called lilipossu. Working out of cosmological ideas about how categories of things (male and female, what pertains to menstruation and childbirth and what pertains to headhunting and war) must be kept separate, men must avoid contact with menstrual blood in the same manner that women must not come into contact with men who have just shed blood in war. Blood must be circumscribed, controlled, or compensated since blood spilled means danger and death. Valeri also points out that there is a particular ambivalence about menstrual bleeding since it is both a sign of women’s potential procreative power as it is also a sign (as opposed to childbirth) that it has not been actualized.³⁴

Following ancestrally ordained cosmology and customs, women see themselves as custodians of virtue and magical knowledge, key agents in the maintenance of their society. They do not see their seclusion as marginal but central to the reproduction of social order, one that makes possible male dominance in the realms of ritual, war, and politics. While Keesing does not claim on this basis that the sexes are equal, he argues that subordination, exploitation, or oppression are bluntly crude concepts that must be examined in specific social circumstances and contexts.

THE power of the cloistered woman is most pronounced in the Hinilawod of Panay.³⁵ In this epic cycle, the binukot is a woman ardently sought because of her beauty, as conveyed by images of fairness (epic similes compare her to the white-bellied fish or the white insides of split bamboo) and grace of bearing (she walks with grace, with measured steps, like a treetop swaying).

Hinilawod presents a multivalent image of the binukot. An episode from the epic tells of the hero Humadapnon’s journey in search of the binukot called Nagmalitong Yawa who lives where the sky and sea meet. In this journey, he is held captive on the mountain island of Tarangban by a multitude of binukot women until he is freed by the superior magic of Nagmalitong Yawa. Nagmalitong Yawa is described as a golden-haired maiden who lives in the "golden bukotan, where she is hidden and not allowed to go out. She occupies herself by sewing or sleeps in a hammock with her face covered with a multicolored magic kerchief. She is a healer and excellent babaylan [priestess, shaman]."

The millions of women in Tarangban are also binukot. Young, beautiful, and graceful in bearing, they live inside a cave, with the fairest of them living in the inmost golden chamber. Here they lead a life of ease, weaving gold threads into the rarest fabric. Enchantresses, they entice Humadapnon by their voice and scent, cast a spell on him, and keep him imprisoned in the cave for seven years.

Hinilawod portrays the binukot in an aspect different from other narratives. They possess supernatural powers, get angry and imperious, and engage in martial combat. The binukots of Tarangban bewitch and imprison the hero and are defeated only by another binukot, Nagmalitong Yawa. In Hinilawod — as in epic narratives in Cotabato and Zamboanga — the binukot is presented as one renowned for her martial skills, A woman known for her powers / A maiden of untold skills.³⁶

The associative links that connect claustration with magic, warfare, and healing are particularly evident in Panay, where the binukot is often referred to as babaylan (medium, healer, seer), diwata (spirit, goddess), and epic singer. In 1993–94, anthropologist Alicia Magos went in search of epic singers in the same general area of Central Panay where Jocano worked some forty years earlier, and identified around a hundred singers. She suggests that many of them are former binukot. Like Jocano, she describes the binukot as an only daughter or the prettiest among the daughters of a couple of good standing in the community, who is jealously kept away from men and commands a high bride price. More important, she links claustration and epic singing, referring to the binukot as women chosen by parents and community elders and trained from childhood in the chanting of epics. "A binukot is the repository of all the beliefs and rituals of the tribe and performs the function of storyteller during important social gatherings. She has a privileged position in the community and is treated like royalty."³⁷

Traditionally, Magos writes, the Sulod epic singer performs lying down in a rattan hammock. The rocking of the hammock, she says, aids in the rhythm of the chant and evokes as well the boat journey that is a recurrent topos in Hinilawod. Interestingly, this style of epic singing recalls the characteristic act of the binukot in Hinilawod in covering her face with a ritual kerchief while lying in a hammock. Watched over by servants who drive away the flies, the hammock is her favorite resting place.

It is relevant to note that in the Palawan Kudaman the heroines do not only rest in hammocks but ride them through the air as a magic conveyance. (In the Subanon narratives, binukot princesses travel in the air on their munsala or head scarf.) Manobo epic singers (male or female) cover themselves with a white blanket, with the face not showing a bit, while squatting on a mat or lying down as they chant the epic.³⁸ In Palawan, the singer sings lying down, left arm covering his eyes, right arm holding a piece of cloth at his chest. The Palawan epic is sung only at night, never in daylight, since the night is believed to be evocative of the sacred. Nicole Revel says that in Palawan all the baylan are epic singers although not all epic singers are baylan.³⁹

More layered are the Maranao narratives of the liyamin. Reserved for the unmarried daughters of the datu, the tower (lamin) is not a prison but a place of privilege which may be a complete community in itself, with the highest-ranking princess (totoo a liyamin), lesser princesses, and ladies-in-waiting. Here they learn the arts and graces befitting their status (music, weaving, embroidery, grooming). The liyamin’s refinements are highly regarded. She walks in the kinikini manner, slowly, gracefully, left hand holding the malong, right hand swaying on the side rhythmically with every step, head slightly bent towards the right shoulder.

The lamin crowns the torogan, the datu’s residence, a large, wooden structure with high ceilings and large beams with ornate carvings that symbolize power and rank. Apart from being the datu’s residence, the torogan serves as communal house for the big feasts in the community. As the strongest, most central structure in the settlement, it also serves as a fortress. If, as it is said, the torogan is the center of the Maranaw universe, the lamin is its most sacrosanct place. The lamin announces to the world that there is a royal lady in the community.

A symbol of wealth and honor, the torogan is zealously guarded. In an assault on the community, the torogan and then the lamin are the last lines of defense, to be defended to the death as a matter of honor. In Darangen, the uprooting of the lamin and abduction of the princess is the ultimate disaster. It is a trophy of war, its capture symbolic of the conquest of a kingdom. In an episode from Darangen, the hero Bantugan returns from raiding several kingdoms on a ship carrying a three-story lamin and, inside it, the radiant princess: "So bright it dazzled the eyes from / All its walls completely made of / Transparent glass, sheets of glass so / Clear, those inside could easily / Look and be seen in the lamin." (III:85-86)

The liyamin is symbol and medium for power-building as alliances are built through marriage. They are prizes to be captured or wed. Hence, in the Maranao epic, the abduction of princesses is a familiar motif in the drama of alliances, warfare, and conquest.

Yet, she is not just a contested resource and object of exchange. She is no prisoner in the tower: she can survey her domain from the high windows of the tower; she can receive visitors (even male visitors) in her chamber; and issue orders and appear in public on special occasions. In Darangen, the liyamin is a learned and articulate person who speaks her mind and expresses a range of emotions. She is consulted by men on certain matters and can even assume the role of king. She can call on supernatural helpers to do battle and has magical possessions (betel-nut chew, amulets, perfumes). Spirits who dwell in the tower, / Who have power throughout the land. / They are so powerful that they / Can order the sun not to shine.

THE binukot complex is ambivalently charged. On one hand — whether the woman is isolated because she is perceived as a source of pollution or secluded to enhance her exchange value — it is commonly interpreted as a form of occlusion and oppression. On the other hand, as the case of deities, shamans, and witches shows, claustration can be generative of autonomous power. Douglas says: To have been in the margins is to have been in contact with danger, to have been at a source of power.⁴⁰ Claustration figures the potentiality of what is different, liminal, and marginal. It enables the enactment of power-generating inwardness, concentration and purification.

The idea of the culture-hero who withdraws from the community, disappears into the forests or some secret place, and reemerges with new power is pervasive in Philippine culture.⁴¹ In the Palawan epic, the practice is evoked in the name of the hero Kudaman, which comes from kutaq, the door of a room, hence he who is inside a closed room. This is explained by the myth of seven female deities who, riding their hammocks, follow a rainbow and come to a place where they bathe. A man steals one of the hammocks and strands one of the female deities whom he later marries. The couple ascend to the sky where they live for eight years. Because they could not bear a child, they ask the god Nagsalad for one. Their wish is granted with the proscription that the child should not be fed his mother’s milk and must be sequestered in a closed room for seven nights. Surviving this test, the child emerges with extraordinary powers. He is called Kudaman, he who is inside a closed room.⁴²

We must remember that the same logic operates in the legendary figures of mountain and cave-dwelling goddesses and the presence, now dimly inscribed in extant epic narratives, of maidens shrouded in darkness.

We should not blur the distinctness of discrete cultural practices. At the same time, however, we need to appreciate their affinities across space as well as their persistence and transformations in time. The figure of the cloistered woman is richly evocative of notions of power. But the source and orientation of power change. Consider the Juan Felix de la Encarnacion 1885 Bisayan dictionary’s definition of binukot (binnocot): A cloistered person, nun, chief, nobleman, friar.⁴³

In the complex and shifting guises of the binukot is marked a history of power.

A Woman

Named Virgin

Mary

A nineteenth-century beata

In the seventeenth century, in the early days of the Spanish campaign to Christianize Mindanao, a woman convert in Dapitan, Zamboanga, applied for admission to a Catholic nunnery, even just as a slave. Recently widowed, she had ceded all her properties to her children, resolved to dedicate her life to God’s service.

She was no ordinary person. Her grandfather, Datu Pambuaya, the son of Rajah Katunao (Sikatuna) of Bohol, was the chief of the Bisayans who had settled in Zamboanga after Bohol was pillaged by Portuguese and Ternatan invaders in 1562. With Katunao and Pambuaya, the woman’s father Manook and husband Maglinti were among the first native chiefs to enter into an alliance with the Spaniards. They valiantly fought with them all over the islands and as far as Malacca and Ternate, winning for their people the reputation among Spaniards as the noblest and bravest nation in Mindanao.

She was a person of exceptional virtue and beauty, Spanish chroniclers attest. Three times, the Sultan of Sulu sent emissaries to ask her to be the sultan’s wife. Each time she refused because she did not wish to subject her faith to the outrages of barbarous and faithless princes.

Despite her virtue and pedigree, she was refused admission to a nunnery because she was a native woman. Undeterred in pursuing the monastic life, she converted her house into a one-nun monastery and spent the rest of her days living a cloistered life.

While Spanish sources praise her for her beauty and chastity, local tradition remembers her as a leader in battle, who lived in a cave where, today, she remains enchanted and alive.

Her name is Maria Uray (Virgin Mary).¹

Men With

Tails

An American depiction of a tailed Philippine native

IN Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, the strange story is told of a member of the Buendia family who had a cartilaginous tail shaped like a corkscrew with a tuft of hair at the end. He kept this secret in forty-two years of complete celibacy until he met a butcher who offered to chop it off with a cleaver. Unfortunately, the amputation was botched and he bled to death. The last of the accursed Buendia family, an infant child eaten alive by white ants, was also born with a tail.

Marquez did not have to invent people with tails. It is one of the most widely distributed and durable teratological tales in history.

In the Philippines, the presence of such monstrosities was reported from the time of the first European contacts with the people of the archipelago. Visiting the Philippines in 1696, the Italian Giovanni Careri reported that as he passed Mindoro island, the Jesuit missionaries who were aboard with him told him that the savage Manghians (Mangyan) of the island had a tail half a span long.¹ The Franciscan missionary Juan Francisco de San Antonio matter-of-factly reported in 1738 that among the tribes of Mindoro there is one which has small tails like the monkeys, as has been certified to me by many friars who have witnessed this; and in our opposite coast of Valer [Baler], a woman with a tail was found not too long ago as has been told to me by the present missionary, not having been able to find the origin of this tribe if it is not of the Jewish race.²

San Antonio’s pious report (with its allusion to the medieval belief that Jews have tails) was repeated by the French scientist Guillaume Le Gentil, who was in the Philippines in 1766–67. Le Gentil was skeptical, saying that he had not himself verified the report and that the best informed persons in Manila regarded it as a fable.³ Around the same time, another Frenchman wrote that this was a well-known story:

The Spaniards thought for a long time that there lived on the island of Mindoro a tribe of savages who had tails like monkeys, but after many inquiries, this belief was found to be false. This old mistake proves, nevertheless, that in the early days of the discovery, the Spaniards were struck with the varieties of the human race they met with in this archipelago.⁴

While many were skeptical, the tale of tailed men persisted. Jean Mallat, who made visits to the Philippines